Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface

1. Introduction: "Cultural Selection" and the Origin of Pictorial Species
2. Antwerp as a Cultural System
3. Town and Country: Painted Worlds of Early Landscapes
4. Money Matters
5. Kitchens and Markets
6. Labor and Leisure: The Peasant
7. Second Bosch: Family Resemblance and the Marketing of Art
8. Descent from Bruegel I: From Flanders to Holland
9. Descent from Bruegel II: Flemish Friends and Family
10. Trickle-Down Genres: The "Curious" Cases of Flowers and Seascapes
11. Conclusions: Value and Values in the Capital of Capitalism

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Promotional Information

Larry Silver investigates the origins of new pictorial types and their media as a phenomenon of sixteenth-century Antwerp and interprets several pictorial genres as he charts their evolution and their role in the development and marketing of individual artistic styles.

About the Author

Larry Silver is Farquhar Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books, including Rembrandt and Art in History, and coeditor (with Jeffrey Chipps Smith) of The Essential Durer, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Reviews

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2006

"Encompassing a complex and varied set of methodologies, economic histories of the arts have framed compelling new questions around the activities of artists, patrons, and dealers as cultural agents that tend to locate meaning in behavior rather than visuality. Larry Silver's entrée into the field not only builds on his own earlier explorations but also significantly reorients the kinds of questions asked and, by extension, the nature of the answers derived from the study of markets."—CAA Reviews

"Grandly conceived and richly rewarding. . . . By integrating current critical methodologies—semiotics, rhetoric, economic theory—into the examination of sixteenth-century painting in Antwerp, Silver's study has significant and far-reaching application and relevance to other disciplines, notably history and literary criticism."—Choice

"A rich and stimulating essay on the symbiotic relationship between artistic development and the market at the beginning of the modern era. . . . A valuable and supremely well informed contribution to our knowledge of both the formation of taste and the evolution of pictorial genres in early modern Europe."—Sixteenth Century Journal